lO FOLLOW THE WHALE 



Many of these coastal people developed a most curious habit. This 

 appears to be a regular feature of man's climb upward and has been 

 developed many times at different ages and among many races all 

 over the world, and it still existed among the Amerindians of Tierra 

 del Fuego. This habit is the accumulation of what we call "kitchen- 

 middens." The term is derived from the Danish word kjokken- 

 moddings, in which kjokken means kitchen, and moddings is equiva- 

 lent to the Old English word midding, which means dunghill or 

 refuse heap. Kitchen-middens are prodigious accumulations, some- 

 times of quite vast extent, of oyster and other sea shells, with some 

 bones, bits of wood, stones, and other rubbish. They occur on many 

 coasts — in Denmark in such quantities that they were once thought 

 to be old beaches that had been raised by a general uplift of the land 

 surface. They are found also in Ireland, on the coast of Cornwall, at 

 the mouth of the Somme in France, all around Australia, in Tas- 

 mania, the Malay Peninsula, the Andaman Islands, and very exten- 

 sively in South Africa, while the coasts of both North and South 

 America are littered with them. These enormous refuse heaps are 

 man-made and represent the garbage dumps of villages or settle- 

 ments of primitive men. Sometimes they form long, meandering 

 banks as much as ten feet in depth, two hundred feet wide, and nine 

 hundred feet long. 



Over these kitchen-middens there has been much discussion. The 

 principal bone of contention has been whether the makers threw 

 the refuse out of their front doors and kept moving their huts back- 

 wards as the heap approached too close, or whether they carted the 

 shells in baskets to the end of the line and dumped them over the 

 ramp. The experts will, however, presumably be debating this point 

 until we ourselves revert to building middens once more. The point 

 is intriguing but entirely academic. Nor does it apply at all in other 

 cases where the makers seem to have been either more or less practi- 

 cal, however you choose to look at it, for they just pitched the shells 

 out, any old where, so that the whole surface of the land is a lattice- 

 work of ridges with cup-shaped hollows between, where the huts 

 stood. Sometimes the ridges form simple rings that must have grown 

 around isolated huts. 



Kitchen-middens are of very great interest, for it is in them that 

 we have found an enormous jumble of things that tell us much 



